The Louis Sarno Archive

Description: This collection of Bayaka music is the largest and most comprehensive collection documenting the music, soundscapes and cultural landscape of one of the world's last remaining traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Drawn to the rainforests of the Central African Republic by some of the most beautiful singing in the world, New Jersey native Louis Sarno travelled there in 1985 with a one-way ticket and a tape recorder. Nearly thirty years later he continues to live with a Bayaka community in and around Yandoumbé, a settlement that he helped found. The result of permanent immersion within a community for almost thirty years, the collection is unprecedented in its scope, scale and ambition. Sarno has recorded every possible aspect of music making and soundscapes among the Bayaka, ranging from polyphony during extended boyobi, ejengi and other ceremonies, through to the full range of instrument playing that includes earth drums, tree drums (gooma), water drums, rasping earth bows, and pot bows (bulubu). Sarno has also accompanied men and women hunting and gathering out in the rainforests and recorded the distinctive music and communication that is central to these activities. Included in the collection are dozens of hours of rainforest soundscapes as Sarno has documented the relationship between music and the wider rainforest acoustic environment. The recordings have been documented and catalogued in partnership with ethnomusicologist Noel Lobley over the course of a decade.

DescriptionThere are audio recordings that are not available at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and therefore, are not listed in this collection. These recordings include a 120 minute DAT containing Bayaka music and soundscapes recorded in the Central African Republic by Louis Sarno, 1st & 2nd June 1996 and CD-Rs containing AIFF files of Bayaka music and soundscapes recorded by Louis Sarno in the villages along the Motaba River in The Republic of Congo, January - March 2002.

DescriptionThere are three photographs that are not available at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and therefore, are not listed in this collection. The accession numbers of these images are 1997.21.3.460, 1997.21.3.1224, and 1997.21.3.1225.